National Republicansintent on fashioning an orderly nominating process after several chaotic cyclesare threatening trigger-happy primary and caucus states with drastic penalties if they attempt to leapfrog the voting line and disrupt the carefully plotted primary calendar.
But a handful of North Carolina GOP legislators are vowing to defend a recently passed law that places their state’s primary fifth-in-line, in late February 2016, right after Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina raise the curtain on the Republican and Democratic nomination battles.
“North Carolina is the biggest threat to the calendar now because there is an uncertainty around the primary here that does not exist elsewhere,” said Josh Putnam, a professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, who runs the web site “Frontloading HQ,” which covers the presidential primary system in obsessive detail.
Backers of the early Tar Heel primary sound a lot like the mischief-making Tallahassee lawmakers who pushed for Florida to hold an earlier-than-expected primary in 2008 and 2012, despite penalties from the national party committees that stripped them of delegates to the national convention.
‘We deserve a voice’
“We deserve a voice as much as any other state,” said Bob Rucho, a conservative state senator from the Charlotte area who is championing the new primary date. “Any state that chooses to should be able to have their citizens be involved in the process of choosing the candidate. The other system has made selections from Dole to McCain to Romney, and each of them did not succeed in winning the presidency. We just feel there is a better way of doing this.”
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It’s not yet clear whether the opinions of Rucho and his allies are shared by most members of the GOP caucus. But state Senate President Phil Berger, who would bring legislation on the primary to the floor, “rarely does anything to go against their wishes,” one Republican familiar with Senate politics told CNN.
“Berger doesn’t want to cross these guys too many times,” the source said. “He is kind of indifferent to all this.”
Senior Republicans in Washington and North Carolina are confident the state will ultimately move its primary.
But if it fails to do so, and North Carolina loses its delegates, presidential campaigns will have to weigh the costs of campaigning in the ninth most populous state and the pricey media markets that come with it.
“It’s an extremely expensive state,” said one political consultant working with a likely Republican presidential candidate. “Spending millions to compete for 12 delegate votes would be malpractice.”
